Colin Calnan's Blog Posts

10 months ago my wife had a baby. Everything changed as you can imagine. Now I have precious little time for doing those things I took for granted a year ago, like a little home coding, or playing with XBMC, or doing whatever I like on a Tuesday evening at home, while sipping a brew and lounging on the sofa after dinner!

I've spent the last few months working at becoming ultra productive both at home and at work to help me get stuff done while also having more time with my family. At Raised Eyebrow we adopt some agile processes and work in Sprints. We define a bunch of tasks that need to get done and sprint on them over the course of a week or two weeks. They have proven to be very productive.

There are around 6 billion active mobile phones worldwide which exceeds the world population. That's a staggering statistic. It's also a huge market. It should be noted that this number relates to all mobile phones, not smartphones specifically, so "dumb" phones as well. Most of these "dumb" phones allow you to perform two basic actions - make & receive voice calls and send & receive SMS messages. Until recently, it's been somewhat difficult, costly and time consuming to try to target these avenues as part of a marketing, fundraising or outreach campaign. We've all seen those ads for text donations to help send aid to Haiti not long after the massive earthquake. For a small organization, a similar campaign method would have been unfeasible until now. Enter Twilio!

As part of an assignment in a Drupal course that I'm giving a UBC this fall, I asked the students to develop a small module that would create a block and output how many days there were until Christmas. This is a relatively simple task as it involves two Drupal hooks and a little bit of date manipulation.

As the students worked on the module it became clear to me that there were two ways in which to handle the date calculation part, that is it could be written in PHP version > 5.2 or in PHP version < 5.2.

Have you ever wanted to add a separator like a comma ',' between the output of taxonomy terms?

When you output a list of terms in a view on Drupal you get something like this:

Topics: Drupal WordPress Development Design Process

So what do you think the topics are? "WordPress Development" "Design Process", or is it "WordPress", "Development", "Design Process"? You can see where I'm going with this. Wouldn't it be nice to add a separator of any kind to make this easier to read? I created a module that adds a Display handler to the Term reference field that allows the output of a separator. It also allows the addition of a separator at the end in the event that you want to separate multiple vocabularies.

We've also been using the amazing Quick Tabs Drupal module by Katherine Bailey for a few recent Drupal builds. This module comes with 3 options for rendering tabs, all of which are completely satisfactory and can be styled in whatever way you see fit. However, because we're using Foundation and want to make the most of what it does for tabs, I wrote a quick module that implements the Foundation tab framework into the Quick Tabs module.

I've always loved teaching. In my 20's I taught guitar to anyone who wanted to learn. I've never been quite sure why I loved it so much. It may be that I'm good with people, having been a musical performer for many years. It may be seeing the satisfaction in a student's face when they finally 'get it'. So when Emira approched me a few weeks back about a request she'd had from UBC in regards to teaching a Drupal course, I jumped at the opportunity.

We recently launched a Drupal distro called DataPublic. I mentioned in the announcement blog post that it was probably the largest codebase we had worked on at Raised Eyebrow, and that's accurate. The number of custom modules, contrib modules and themes used was definitely up there with some of the largest sites we've built for clients.